All Saints at
Gazeley, near Newmarket, was the first
church that I visited after an
international team of scientists
conclusively proved that God did not
exist. Thus begins the original
entry for Gazeley parish church on this,
the Suffolk Churches site, back in May
2003. At that stage, I had visited more
than 600 Suffolk churches, and the site
was moving towards a kind of completion.
The entries were becoming longer and
tending more towards the philosophical.
The acquisition of a digital camera meant
that I could already see I would need to
do the whole lot again, but that would be
in the future. For now, I had Norfolk in
my sights, and there was an end-of-term
feel to what I was writing about Suffolk.
I am afraid that All Saints, Gazeley,
took the full brunt of it.

The article generated a fair
amount of correspondence, as you may
imagine. It was discussed on BBC Radio
Suffolk. I was questioned rather
cautiously about it by someone in the
Diocese.

The parish
themselves took it rather well. To be honest, I
had caught them at a low ebb, and they welcomed
the publicity. I had also visited them
immediately before a time of great change, when
heads had fallen, but loins were about to be
girded, and the Church of England was stirring
itself again in that lovely village. One of the
advantages of visiting every parish church in
East Anglia is that you also get to see every
parish, of course, and I soon fell in love with
these sleepy, fat villages along the
Cambridgeshire border. I would move there
tomorrow, quite happily.

I hope I may
be allowed the luxury of not rewriting the
original Gazeley entry, but instead reprinting it
in a slightly briefer form, and adding a
postscript. It still makes the point I was
originally trying to make, and the contrast
between then and now shows this special place in
a light it thoroughly deserves, for this is one
of East Anglia's loveliest churches, and deserves
all the visitors it can get. Anyway, I thought so
then, and I certainly think so now.

2003: All
Saints at Gazeley, near Newmarket, was the first
church that I visited after an international team
of scientists conclusively proved that God did
not exist. I was intrigued to know how a wealthy,
reasonably large Suffolk village would respond to
this challenge. What would they do with their
church? I had a theory. I suspected that the old
church buildings would continue to find a
community use. Small groups of people would still
congregate on a Sunday mornings to sing
comforting songs and feel good about each other.
The churches would still be used by secular
couples wanting a fancy wedding, and the local
villagers would still want to be buried in the
graveyard. But the building would no longer have
a Christian use.

It was with some dismay, however, that I arrived
in Gazeley to discover that the rot had already
set in. The first sign of this was the way in
which the large windows facing onto the road had
holes the size of small rocks in them. This was
disturbing, especially because the east window at
Gazeley is one of the most remarkable Decorated
windows in East Anglia. The head of the window
consists of two elegant overlapping trefoils, but
there is no head to the arch, the head itself
having cusps. You can see it in the left hand
column; Cautley thought it was unique.

I went and tried the door, but of course it was
locked. Ever since the announcement of God's
non-existence, heads have dropped in the Anglican
community, and many of them no longer have the
will to welcome strangers and visitors. I went
next door to the Rectory. I knocked on the door,
rang the bell. Nobody came. Perhaps the Rector
had fled town. I was here with DD, who was
becoming increasingly frustrated by our inability
to raise a key. I had tried phoning several
numbers I had taken from the Diocesan website,
but nobody had answered. There were keyholders
listed in the church porch, but no phone numbers.
Gazeley is a fairly large village, and we didn't
have a street map, but by driving around (sorry
about the carbon monoxide, folks) we tracked some
of the houses down. Several cars were on the
driveways outside (as I said, this is a wealthy
village) but nobody came to the door. Perhaps
they had given up in despair. I felt Gazeley's
strange torpor beginning to settle on me like
snow.

We found the house where the last address was
supposed to be. I went to the side door, and
eventually someone answered. "Yes?" he
was very curt, so I don't know who he was
expecting. I, however, was a model of charm and
good manners, and explained my mission to see
inside Gazeley church, and that I understood he
was a keyholder, a churchwarden in fact. His wife
came to the kitchen door behind him, to see who
it was. I could smell cooking, and I assumed that
they were both about to eat, the time being 5pm
on a Saturday.

"The church is locked", he said. I
agreed that this was the case, and wondered if
access was possible. "It was open earlier
today, you should have come then", he
observed. I concurred that it would have been
better, but that we had been visiting other
churches, and had only just arrived in Gazeley.
He thought for a second. "I'll have to come
with you. How much time will you need?"

Now, as at Tuddenham that morning, I was placed
in a quandary. Quite simply, I had to lie. If I
told him that DD would need at least two hours to
document the place, there was no way we were
going to get inside. On the other hand, I
couldn't very well force the man to sit in the
church waiting for us while his dinner got cold.
I decided that the best thing to do was to get
him into the church and then offer to lock it up
for him.

The man checked that the twenty minutes I had
suggested would not deprive him of his tea, and
walked with me up to the church. DD headed off in
his Elise and met us there. On the way, the man
explained how he and his wife had spent the day
preparing the church for the harvest festival. I
made a mental note that this was another event
that had survived the death of God, as would
Christmas probably.

We walked across the wide open graveyard, and I
looked up at the great ship of Gazeley church.
There is no doubt which county you are in; here,
the complete rebuilding of the nave with
clerestory and aisles was at the start of the
16th century, and as at Blythburgh they didn't
get around to rebuilding the tower before the
Protestant Reformation intervened. The huge
chancel had been built on the eve of the Black
Death, and has similarities with the one at
Mildenhall. Perhaps a rebuilding was planned, but
it never happened. The tower was largely
reconstructed in the 19th century.

To my surprise, he took us not to either south or
north porch, but to the great west door. This led
us beneath the tower and behind the organ, and we
stepped into darkness. Daylight was fading, but
here it must be always gloomy, among the broom
cupboards and stacks of junk. The churchwarden
found the light switches, and we walked around
the organ into the body of the church.

Back in the days when God still existed, I had
been to Gazeley church before. It had been a
bright, cold February morning in 1999, and I was
cycling from Newmarket to Ipswich. I'd arrived in
Gazeley to find the church open, and had thought
it lovely. There was a delicate balance between
respect for the medieval and the demands of the
modern liturgy. It felt at once a house of prayer
and a spiritual touchstone to the long
generations. However, the slight crimp in all
this was that, at the time, the regular Sunday
congregation of Gazeley church had been reduced
to single figures. The same was true of
neighbouring Kentford. The Rector may not have
been to blame; he was very energetic in in his
pastoral activities in the village, and people
still turned up for the big occasions. But I
wondered what effect all this had had, and asked
the churchwarden.

He was very candid. He told me that they had had
a terrible time of it. The electoral roll had
fallen to just three people, and this is not a
small village. Nobody wanted to come to church
anymore. He had lived in the village for years,
and had seen all this happen. It was only in the
last year or so that he felt the church had been
turned around by the new Rector (the one I had
suspected of leaving town). Now, there were more
than twenty of them, and they felt like a proper
community again, he said.

I found this interesting. The previous Rector had
been a Forward in Faith-supporting
Anglo-catholic, and such a tradition was not
terribly popular with the suits at Diocesan
House. The new Rector had moved the church back
towards the mainstream.

I looked around the vast open nave. All Saints is
one of the biggest churches in the west of the
county, and it must take a good five hundred
people to make it feel full. I tried to imagine
what it must have been like here, just three in
the congregation.

The warden and his wife had tried hard to
decorate the church for the harvest festival, and
it looked particularly lovely towards the east.
The greenery on the tombchest and piscina was
very well done. But inevitably the fruit and
vegetables were sparse, and there was no
disguising the general air of shabbiness and
decay underneath the decoration. I felt a bit
sorry for the churchwarden; he had stuck with the
place through thick and thin, and clearly loved
it. The chancel and central eastern part of the
nave were clean and tidy, but all around were the
encroaching shadows, and here lurked the dust and
dirt.

The higher you looked, the filthier it became.
The clerestory windows were coated in grime, and
the lower parts cloaked in decades of cobwebs.
The medieval cross beams are still in place, but
the Victorian roof above is leaky, and areas of
damp showed above the high arcades. It seemed
unlikely that all this could have happened in the
short time since the Geneva declaration of 2007
announced all faith in a Supreme Being to be
'utterly null and void'. Mortlock had commented
on the poor condition of the royal arms as long
ago as 1988. Could it be that they were in this
state when this building was still in use for
Christian worship?

Having seen the stone holes in the windows, I was
mightily relieved that the Victorians had reset
the medival glass up in the clerestory. This
seems a curious thing to have done, since it
defeats the purpose of a clerestory, but if they
had not done it then we might have lost them. The
glass matches the tracery in the north aisle
windows, so that is probably where they came
from. I had seen them on my previous visit, but
could not remember where they were, and when I
asked the keyholder he did not seem aware that
the chuch had any medieval glass. Eventually I
found it. There are angels, three Saints and some
shields, most of which are heraldic but two show
the instruments of the passion and the Holy
Trinity. I would not be surprised to learn that
some of the shields are 19th century, but the
figures are all original late 15th or early 16th
century. The Saints are an unidentified Bishop,
the hacksaw-wielding St Faith and one of my
favourites, St Apollonia. She it was who was
invoked by medieval people against toothache.

It struck me
as I gazed up that many parish churches had much
less to lose than Gazeley. At one time, these
places were vibrant hubs of spiritual
communities, but now they would be left to wither
and die. Some might become houses; Gazeley's
church is much too big. Some might be kept as
examples of our redundant belief systems, but
here at Gazeley there would be too much to tidy
up and sort out. So All Saints at Gazeley must be
considered merely as a treasure house. Here,
then, is a guide to why it must survive the 2007
Geneva Declaration.

Firstly, the chancel. Here, the space created by
the clearing of clutter makes it at once
mysterious and beautiful. Above, the early 16th
century waggon roof is Suffolk's best of its
kind; Mortlock points out the little angels
bearing scrolls, the wheat ears and the vine
sprays, and the surviving traces of colour. The
low side window on the south side still has its
hinges, for here it was that updraft to the rood
would have sent the candles flickering in the
mystical church of the 14th century. On the south
side of the sanctuary is an exquisitely carved
arched recess, that doesn't appear to have ever
had a door, and may have been a very rare
purpose-built Easter sepulchre at the time of the
1330s rebuilding. Opposite is a huge and
stunningly beautiful piscina, and beside it are
sedilia that end in an arm rest carved in the
shape of a beast. It is one of the most
significant Decorated moments in Suffolk.

On the floor of the chancel there is a tiny,
perfect chalice brass, one of only two surviving
in Suffolk. The other is at Rendham. Not far away
is the indent of another chalice brass - or
perhaps it was for the same one, and the brass
has been moved for some reason. There are two
chalice indents at Westhall, but nowhere else in
Suffolk. Chalice brasses were popular memorials
for Priests in the 15th and early 16th centuries,
and thus were fair game for reformers. Heigham
memorials of the late 16th century are on the
walls. Back in the south aisle there is a
splendid tombchest in Purbeck marble. It has lost
its brasses, but the indents show us where they
were, as do other indents in the aisle floors.
Some heraldic brass shields survive, and show
that Heighams were buried here. Brass
inscriptions survive in the nave and the chancel,
dating from the late 16th and early 17th
centuries.

Piled up and decrepit in the south west corner
are some extraordinary 14th century benches with
pierced tracery backs. Some of them appear to
spell out words; Mortlock thought one might say Salaman
Sayet. The block of benches to the north
appear to have been made using sections of the
15th century rood loft. Further north, the early
17th century benches may appear crude, but were
almost certainly the work of the village
carpenter.

The 14th century font is a stunning example of
the tracery pattern series that appeared in the
decades before the Black Death. They may have
been intended to spread ideas at that time of
great artistic and intellectual flowering before
it was so cruelly snatched away. The cover is
17th century.

The place is
absolutely glorious, but few people seem to know
about it, and fewer seem to care. If it had been
clean, tidy and open, Simon Jenkins England's
Thousand Best Churches would not have been
able to resist it. Should the survival of such a
treasure store depend upon the existence of God
or the continued practice of the Christian faith?
Or might there be other reasons to keep this
extraordinary building in something like its
present integrity? It needs thousands spent on
it, hundreds of thousands, but is this something
that we as a nation or culture should consider
worth doing? Will it be sufficient to photograph
it all and then let it fall, or do we need to
rescue this building before it is too late?

The churchwarden and I stood and chatted while DD
took his photos. Increasingly, it seemed to me
that what the parish needed was not condemnation
for the state the building was in, but
encouragement to put it right. I pointed out
several of the features outlined above, but I
think the poor man was beginning to register
quite what a task he had on his hands, so I fell
quiet. I did reassure him that the building
really was the responsibility of us all, and not
just the Church of England; it was the heart and
touchstone of the whole village, and not just of
his faith community.

We'd been there for nearly an hour. I took pity,
and offered to lock up and return the key to his
house. He thought about it for a moment. I
guessed he was weighing up whether or not he
trusted us to make the church secure (he'd seen
DD's car, and knew we wouldn't be stealing the
font). "Well, you don't need to bring the
key back", he said after some thought.
"It's a yale lock. Just let yourself out,
and let the door close behind you." And he
said goodbye and went home - rather more
thoughtfully, I fear, than he had left it.

It was dark. DD finished, and we packed up. I put
out the lights, and stood for a moment in the
wide gloom, in the infinite stillness. I listened
to the sound of my own breathing. I knew this was
the most endangered building I had visited so far
on my travels. But I'm determined we won't lose
it.

2008: At the end of the original
article, I had pointed out that the 2007 Geneva
Declaration on the non-existence of God was, of
course, entirely fictitious. This was partly to
reassure the good people of Gazeley, but also to
save confusing any excitable Dawkinsites. Gazeley
church was, after all, still in use for Christian
worship. I also pointed out that the rest of the
article was completely true as things had stood
in May 2003. However, over the next few months I
received a number of e-mails from people in the
parish telling me how the church was being taken
to task, tidied up, cleaned out, and, even more
important, made accessible. Coming back in May
2008 I was delighted to discover than both the
south and north doors were now open, and I
stepped out of the sunlight into an interior
which positively shouted its welcome to pilgrims
and strangers. Perhaps it helped that it was such
a beautiful day; the interior was full of light
falling across ancient stone and woodwork.
verything shone with love and care. Quite
frankly, it lifted the heart. Perhaps the most
moving sight was of the brightly coloured
children's table and chairs, which have been
given pride of place at the east end of the south
aisle, rather than being tucked away under the
tower or behind the font. Having once almost lost
its congregation altogether, the community at
Gazeley now puts its children's corner in a
prominent position, where everyone can see it.

The
wide open space of the chancel was still
one of the loveliest interiors I knew in
Suffolk; but now it had something else, a
feeling of hope. Great things had
happened here. I mentioned it afterwards
to a Catholic Priest friend of mine, and
he said he hoped I knew I'd seen the
power of the Holy Spirit at work. And
perhaps that is so. Certainly, the energy
and imagination of the people here have
been fired by something. I wanted to find
someone to ask about it, to find out how
things stood now. But there was no one,
and so the building spoke for them.

Back outside in the
graveyard, the dog daisies clustered and
waved their sun-kissed faces in the light
breeze. The ancient building must have
known many late-May days like this over
the centuries, but think of all the
changes that it has known inside! The
general buffeting of the winds of history
still leaves room for local squalls and
lightning strikes. All Saints has known
these, but for now a blessed calm reigns
here. Long may it remain so.